January 25, 2013

Our firm needs 100 volunteers to attend and participate in a rally in front of the British Consulate/Embassy in Midtown Manhattan on the East Side on Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 12 noon. The event is being held in order to protest wind turbines that are being built in Scotland and England. Your participation will be to ONLY stand next to or behind the speakers and elected officials/celebrities that will be speaking at the rally.

“Volunteers” will each get $20. That’s the going rate in New York City for a closely held political principle.

Most Americans like clean energy. So when conservatives wage campaigns against clean energy initiatives, they have typically resorted to fronting astroturf groups and paying fake protesters to generate noise.

Needing 100 anti-wind protesters by next week and apparently unable to find them, a mysterious firm advertised a “quick and easy $20″ on Craigslist. According to the ad, the only thing the “volunteers” would need to do for their pay is “stand next to or behind the speakers and elected officials/celebrities” at a rally against a wind turbine project in the UK.

A secretive funding organisation in the United States that guarantees anonymity for its billionaire donors has emerged as a major operator in the climate “counter movement” to undermine the science of global warming, The Independent has learnt.

The Donors Trust, along with its sister group Donors Capital Fund, based in Alexandria, Virginia, is funnelling millions of dollars into the effort to cast doubt on climate change without revealing the identities of its wealthy backers or that they have links to the fossil fuel industry.

However, an audit trail reveals that Donors is being indirectly supported by the American billionaire Charles Koch who, with his brother David, jointly owns a majority stake in Koch Industries, a large oil, gas and chemicals conglomerate based in Kansas.

Millions of dollars has been paid to Donors through a third-party organisation, called the Knowledge and Progress Fund, with is operated by the Koch family but does not advertise its Koch connections.

–

Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Drexel University in Philadelphia, has estimated that over the past decade about $500m has been given to organisations devoted to undermining the science of climate change, with much of the money donated anonymously through third parties.

Well I had an odd day at work today: I had a guy, who has an advanced medical degree approach me with a copy of what looked like a journal article. The article said in its abstract that CO2 and CH4 could actually cause cooling of the earth system, and had no affect on warming. WTF?? The fella showing me the article, a firm republican in constant fear of socialism (he came from the USSR), tried to tell me the earth was in a cooling phase. WTF?? I didn’t get to see the entire article, but there was a lot of underlining he had scribbled in, as if he had been studying the thing for a test. An insanity test.

So I drew for him a picture of the earth and the atmosphere’s IR black body curves and tried to explain when one points satellites toward the earth and examines IR radiation, that there is a huge chunk of IR energy not coming from the 700 cycles/cm region, even though that such is a great place for energy to escape, based on simple, black body physics. I then explained that is the region CO2 absorbs in. The effect is so pronounced that the only IR energy in that region is that from the atmospheric curve: Its as if there were only an atmosphere radiating energy away into space, and the earth were not radiating anything at that particular point.

Then he changed the subject, and I internally shook in anger. He wouldn’t tell me the name of the journal the article came from. He didn’t have to….

2) the ones organising the protest are clearly clueless to the issues. The UK installs lots of wind turbines yes, but on a per capita basis they are way behind nations like Ireland Indeed they are looking into building windfarms in Ireland now(consistently 15% of our elec from wind, 50% on windy days) to export the power to the UK.
or Germany.

3) The UK doesn’t actually make many turbines, they mostly import them from Denmark, German, China and indeed the US (those pesky brits, giving jobs to Americans!).

4) It sounds like some meglomanic’s minions were tasked with organising a protest, came up short, know that no is not a word in his vocabulary and so in desperation they put up this add. Again, that sounds alot like a certain wig wearer!

5) Clearly any experienced Greenwasher/Astroturfer would see the obvious flaws in putting an add on Craigslist. The anti-wind movement generally ain’t this dumb. The Koch brothers are too experienced at this sort of stuff to foul up like this. So that suggests some outfit that’s new and clueless….

Here is what jumped into my paranoid mind. We know about this because the people at Grist were vigilant but how often are these shenanigans undetected? I also imagined the hilarious scenario where a group of concerned people–the kind who come to this site–accepted the stipend to act as photo-op backdrop but while the video was rolling and at a crucial point broke into “spontaneous” boos and catcalls. And afterwards, of course, demanded their $20.